Tell the Board of County Commissioners we can't afford an unneeded expansion of urban growth!

Hi Friend --

Spokane County is hoping that you won't show up to yet another hearing on June 3rd to tell them again to stop promoting sprawl with unneeded and expensive urban growth area expansions.

Suddenly the county is planning for thousands more people to move to our region than they were the last time hundreds of you told them they were too high on their growth projections. They are hoping you won't notice.

It's time to plan for growth that we can realistically expect. The county has not demonstrated that it will create any new revenue to pay for it's unneeded expansion - while growth trends show our metro area continues to be slow-growing despite our historically oversized urban growth boundary. Spokane's metro area ranked dead last in Washington and #208 out of 293 in a national survey to identify the fastest US growing cities.

We can't afford to provide more than one billion dollars worth of new services and infrastructure for an influx of people that we can't realistically expect.

Attend next Tuesdays hearing and tell the county to face the facts--unneeded urban growth area expansions are not good for tax payers or the economy!

June 3, 2014 at 5:30 p.m.
Commissioners Hearing Room
Lower Level, Spokane County Public Works Building
1026 W. Broadway Avenue
email kitty@futurewise.org if you need to arrive late and want to be signed in.

We have to stop the expensive an economically stifling practice of pushing growth to the rural fringes of our urban areas rather than focusing on city centers where the infrastructure and services needed already exist. Our metropolitan area is littered with vacant lots and empty buildings that will never be filled if we continue to allow land speculators to build on the periphery of existing urban areas. Click here to see how much vacant land is in our existing urban growth area.

Enough is enough!

Kitty Klitzke
Eastern Washington Program Director

P.S. Our County's Urban Growth Area (UGA) already covers over 89 square miles, this is over 2.5 times larger than the City of Paris, France. Their population, at 2.2 million is almost 5 times the population of Spokane County. Further, 25% of growth in the last decade has happened outside our urban areas and the UGA itself has not reached the population it was planned to accommodate. Join me and stand up one more time for good planning next week!​